Chair of Cartography of the University of Bonn supports UN-disaster management operations in Haiti after hurricane Ike with an OGC-based emergency route service based on OpenRouteService.org

Weeks after hurricane „Ike“– that killed over a hundred people and left tens of thousands homeless - has devastated Haiti the situation is still tense. Because of flooded and destroyed streets and bridges the humanitarian operations lead by the US for the over 650.000 affected people the situation remains difficult.  In order to avoid famine and epidemics the people need to be supplied by food, medicine and other goods and the rebuilding of the infrastructure needs to be organized.

The UN Joint Logistics Center (UNJLC) – a unity hosted by the World Food Program (WFP) – organises the logistics for the UN operations in the context of the „logistics cluster“. The UNJLC defines and implements the UN SDI-T (T for transportation) which constitutes the transport-related branch of the United Nations Spatial Data Infrastructure (UNSDI) under development. For the current operation is information about the actual condition of the streets very important, as well as information about hindrances, danger areas and the situation of the infrastructure at large. Several NGOs such as CartONG.org  support the data collection, analyze them and present the results to the help organizations involved and the public.  In that context the Chair of Cartography of the Department of Geography of the University of Bonn was asked by UNJLC to support the implementation of a route planning service for Haiti that takes the actual street condition into account.

Through the spontaneous help of some volunteers (Pascal Neis, Sebastian Schmitz, Michael Auer) of the Research Group Cartography, Prof. Alexander Zipf, the existing OpenRouteService.org was extended in functionality and data. This allowed to make a new special version of the Emergency Route Service available to UNJLC within a few days. This is now used by the head quarters and the local forces in Haiti for optimizing the logistics of the disaster management operation.

The first problem was finding a street dataset suitable for routing. While OpenStreetMap covers many European cities very well – and even some cities in 3rd world countries are covered better than one would expect, the OSM-coverage in Haiti was minimal. Therefore an alternative data set has been search and was found. In general UNJLC wants to use the easy to use and accessible OpenStreetMap infrastructure to provide frequent updates representing the current conditions of the traffic infrastructure. But the OSM license allows only importing “free” geodata. This was generated based on other free data and earlier mission data. It will be included into the OSM database soon.

Using those data also a first simple Web Map Service (OGC WMS) using Styled Layer Descriptors (OGC SLD) has been realized.  That WMS is needed for the Haiti Mission, as the typical OSM renderers such as Mapnik do not show updated geodata early enough. At least a daily refresh is necessary and will be provided through the ORS-Haiti team at the Department of Geography, University of Bonn for all services available through the ORS-Haiti website, such as routing, geocoding, map service, accessibility analysis etc.

An important feature of OpenRouteService.org for the disaster management operation was to consider blocked areas or streets when routing. This means that streets inside those regions a not used for routing.  The OGC standard implemented in ORS, the Open Location Services Route Service, defines so called „AvoidAreas“, which can be used to realize such a functionality. OpenRouteService.org offers two alternatives for using this: The first one is available through the GUI of OpenRouteService.org, where a user can draw those AvoidAreas interactively on the map. Those areas are avoided when this user calculates a route. But as the polygons are only available on the client side other users do not have access to them. Therefore a second option was realized that allows staff from the organizations involved to upload spatial data sets that represent those AvoidAreas into the geodatabase of ORS-Haiti though the Web-interface. Those areas then are available for any users of the site. They can be activated for routing through clicking an option on the web page.  A similar approach is used for considering information about traffic jams or construction works based on RDS-TMC data in Germany (prototype for NRW & Bavaria only).

While a lot of improvements regarding functionality and usability seem sensible first feedback from users in Haiti has confirmed that the service is a valuable help for the disaster management work in Haiti even in such a quickly released first prototype.

A range of several OGC standards  are used behind the scenes, including

OpenLS Route Service
OpenLS Utility Service (Geocoder / Reverse Geocoder)
OpenLS Directory Service
OGC Web Map Service (WMS)
OGC Web Feature Service (WFS)
for further components of ORS compare: http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/index.php/OpenRouteService
Relevant for optimizing and planning the logistics of the humanitarian operations and disaster management is also another service that is integrated into OpenRouteService: The (not yet standardized) Accessibility Analysis Service (AAS) calculates the areas that can be reached within a given time (Isochrones) from a given location.

The specialized version of OpenRouteService for Haiti shows that open data and open standards offer a sensible approach for realizing applications using geographical information – in particular in the case of disaster management as proofed through this real world scenario.

Contact:
Chair of Cartography
Prof. Dr. Alexander Zipf
Department of Geography
Bonn University

• http://www.geographie.uni-bonn.de/karto

• http://www.openrouteservice.org